Best Of Shubnum Khan's "The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan

"Beti, when you're away from your family and everything you know for so long, it eats you up. I did not understand this then. I stopped talking so much or going anywhere. I stopped sleeping. I just sat with my books and pretended to read."

p.45

"...and she realizes then that a memory can make you whole."

p.48

"Sana has seen many shapes that people can take: broken and whole, full and empty, but she has never seen anything quite like this. The woman who seats herself before them seems to have a shattered quality to her, as if she is glass; you look hard enough, and a thousand reflections look back."

p. 58

He is a tall man, taller than most, and the first thing that strikes you about him is the ease with which he carries this fact. He does not crumple himself, nor bring attention to it, but holds himself as one who is contented however he may be.

p. 90

"I teach the piano," Zuleikha says. "Mostly to children with no talent. Their parents don't understand you either have it or you don't; there's this place  in the music where you choose to fall or step back, this place where you can see the edge and you are not afraid to go forward," [...] "My mother saw it in me; she recognized the edge, and instead of pulling me back she pushed me toward it and when I fell over, when I went in, I could see everything."

p.104

Surely love was not a thing that always left. She thinks of the old couple that lived next door on the farm. The old woman, Tant Elsie, was suffering from dementia and her husband, Oom Piet, always held her hand, even as he laid the table in the evenings and made soup for her. When Sana visited he would tell stories about Tant Elsie's childhood as if they were his, talk about her father and her mother and the way she ran around her kitchen barefoot as a child racing after her sisters until her mother took a broom and knocked her feet. The fact that he could make her memories his own made Sana believe that love was not a thing that always left. 

Love, to her, was the thing that stayed.

p.105

"She was a fool. She loved him like it was the end of the world. Like everything was falling apart and he was all she could hold on to."

p.183

"When there's nothing left, you can only go home."

p.185